(By Martin Haspelmath): "Ditransitive verbs are verbs with two arguments in addition to the subject: a “recipient” or “addressee” argument, and a “theme” argument. Typical ditransitive verb meanings are ‘give’, ‘sell’, ‘bring’, ‘tell’. Since different ditransitive verbs occur in different constructions in many languages, only a single verb meaning was taken into account for this chapter: the verb ‘give’, which is probably the most frequent ditransitive verb in all languages. ❡
The parameter of variation examined here is the relationship between the coding properties of the two ditransitive objects and the properties of the single object in a standard monotransitive construction (with a typical transitive verb like ‘catch’ or ‘kill’; this object is called patient here). The two coding properties which are taken into account are case or adpositional marking and person-number indexing (“agreement”) on the verb."